The Legacy of Eden. Nelle Davy

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СКАЧАТЬ There were no jars of multicolored candy, no licorice laces in red and purple spools. The place smelled and everything seemed dull and boring. She felt she had been betrayed and so she did what she would always do in the face of disappointment. She threw a tantrum.

      Her father was angrier with her than usual. Normally he would gaze at her in a cool, collected way until he eventually gave in or she exhausted herself. But this time he slapped her on the back of her legs, hauled her up by the arm and dragged her out of the store, her legs curling underneath her as she tried to kick out in anger and frustration, and then quite suddenly he dropped her; he just let go and the slam of earth on skin made her sob stick in her throat. The silence for the both of them seemed eerie, but while she looked up at him, he was looking somewhere else.

      My grandmother said that the moment she saw Julia curled up on the floor next to her father, staring at him obstinately, snot and drool spitting from her lips and nose, she knew she did not like her. It was not the mess the child had made of herself, it was the way she had looked from her father to her, and how when she had seen that his attention had been caught by someone else, her eyes narrowed and she spat out another spit trail that curled under her chin.

      “I didn’t know you would be here,” Cal said when he finally found his voice.

      “I was out getting groceries,” said Anne-Marie.

      Cal saw her lips covered in rouge and the swell of the jaw beneath the heavy makeup. He reached out to touch her and she shrank back, and glanced over her shoulder quickly to see if anyone had been watching. He snaked his fingers through his hair in frustration.

      “I thought about calling,” he said.

      “I am glad you didn’t.”

      She was so cold as she stood there waiting for him to finish, as if he were just another piece of nuisance she had to climb over before she could carry on with her day. It angered him, this aloofness of hers. It made him want to smack her again just to get a reaction. Suddenly he began to feel sick.

      “I don’t know what … I don’t—”

      She continued to stare at him, her foot rubbing against her ankle in impatience. Beside him he felt his daughter shift and her shoe scuffed against his heel with a small kick. He looked down at her and saw her glare back at him. Her knee was bleeding.

      “Please don’t talk to me again,” Anne-Marie said finally.

      He panicked. “Lavin—”

      “Don’t you ever—” She took a step forward and he saw more clearly the yellowish swirls near her jaw. “Ever call me that again.”

      She walked away, passing Leo as he came out with a bag of horse feed. Leo saw his brother standing there, his mouth open, looking at the doctor’s wife and his niece sprawled on the floor, her left knee bleeding, her face bright red as she stared with hatred at her father.

      “Cal?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

      Cal looked down at his daughter and with one hand pulled her up. She cocked her bad knee for effect as she stood but he didn’t seem to notice.

      “Will you take Julia back for me, please?” he asked.

      “You thought any more on what I said?” asked Leo as he cradled the feed.

      “Yeah, I—I listened.”

      Leo paused. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s go, girl,” he said to his niece.

      What happened next no one really knows. There was to be a lot of speculation that surrounded the events of the next sixteen hours for some time afterward. Everyone had their own theories. Leo believed Cal had been planning it all along, Piper believed that the opportunity presented itself and Cal was too weak to say no. My grandmother believed it was destiny. I don’t know what I believe.

      Because it was so unexpected, so shocking, that it has never really made sense. Trying to rationalize it now could only be accomplished through conjecture and imagination. All I know is that my grandfather was a man who felt things deeply. He hated that about himself. He tried not to grow attached, but he was simply a man to whom burdens came easily, and every time he tried to shrug them off, the weight of his guilt would burden him all over again. So here is what I think happened.

      I think he was afraid. Afraid of who he was and what he wanted and what he didn’t want to be.

      I think he was tired of fighting for what he wanted, tired of fighting himself for wanting those things in the first place and tired of feeling guilty for all of the above.

      I think he wanted to settle. I think he wanted it all to stop. I think he knew that life had a will of its own and for the second time he was willing to be borne along by it. I think he reasoned that he was a man, not a boy this time, and he could deal with things better.

      I think he was sick of feeling like a failure.

      Piper cooked dinner for herself and Julia that evening. She made a chocolate pecan pie for dessert that Julia wolfed down in sullen self-pity. She put her niece to bed and checked on her father, before going to bed herself at around eleven. Cal still wasn’t home. The next morning she fixed breakfast, changed her father and gave him a sponge bath. She enlisted Julia’s help in the chores, but gave up after her niece kept crumpling to the floor in mock agony on account of her “bad leg.” She went to check on her eldest brother, but when she knocked on the door he didn’t answer and when she tried the handle, it was locked. She assumed he was still asleep.

      She went to bring Leo some lunch. He was down by the crops on the far side of the farm near the stream. When she gave it to him, he nodded in thanks before jerking his head to the left of her.

      “See that?” he asked.

      Piper turned. Against the well was the stone slab cover. Now broken, the pieces were splayed against the base of the well.

      “What happened?”

      Leo shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

      This was before she discovered that Cal had gone to speak with their father. This was before she would check in on Walter at six to bring him supper, when she would find him, eyes gazing upward and unseeing, his mouth half-open with a fly crawling across his upper lip.

      This was before the funeral and the reading of the will, when things still made sense to her. But later on, after everything, she would recall this moment and wonder.

      Anne-Marie was in the kitchen when she heard that Walter Hathaway had died. She was peeling potatoes for a stew. She listened to her husband talk of the man’s heart failure and willed herself not to scream. She sliced the knife through the potato into her palm when he mentioned the funeral.

      “Good God, woman, what is the matter with you lately?” her husband asked as he pulled up her arm, down which a thin trail of blood was already pouring. “First your jaw, now this. Your head is in the clouds, Anne-Marie.”

      “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

      The night before the funeral Anne-Marie pressed her husband’s best black suit and a somber-looking navy dress with a high-buttoned neck that irritated her skin, and hung them both on the front of their wardrobes. Then when her husband was asleep she went downstairs, pulled aside the half СКАЧАТЬ